In recent years as business records are increasingly kept in digital form, a need has arisen to convert older, paper-based records to digital format as well. Various ways have been devised to do this conversion, for example having each individual document scanned to convert it to digital form.
Another alternative is to have each document transcribed, that is, re-typed, to place the document into digital form. Such a transcription process is expensive and often prone to error due to the nature of the process and the difficulty of properly reading and interpreting any handwritten notes and data.
A variety of automatic scanning methods are being introduced that largely eliminate the manual transcription of the paper records. Such automatic methods may include some form of optical character recognition to further assist the transformation. For some records, it is sufficient to keep images of the pages of the paper record as opposed to extracting the relevant information from each page.
Often the older records are kept as collections grouped together by some underlying unifying measure. Commonly this unifying measure is customer identification or perhaps a patient identification.
One example is a medical practice that is converting to an all-electronic system of patient recordkeeping. A typical medical practice may have many thousand folders containing patient data that need to be digitized to be compatible with the new system.
Collections of records are common in other professional settings, for example legal offices, where there may be large amounts of paper documents associated with a particular case or client.
A step in the scanning process is to ensure that the scanned data from each collection is properly associated with the proper identification. This identification allows access to a database that allows access to all of the records associated with this particular entity, e.g. customer, client, or patient.
The transfer of the data in the paper records will thus result in adding to the existing data in the database. However, the scanned data should be properly associated with the data already in the system.
Current practices tend to have the operator of the scanning device key in the identification number. This manual entry is prone to error; and therefore, extra effort must be expended to ensure that the proper patient identification is associated with the scanned patient data.
Because of the need to keep track of the large volume of paper records systems have been devised to code the identification information on the container of the collection to assist in keeping each collection in its proper place. An example of this is the colored edge marking that is common in medical practice record keeping.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have way to utilize the existing coding of the identification to ensure proper extraction of the identification associated with a paper collection of information that is being processed for transfer to an electronic system.